> He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.

That sounds an organizational issue. I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible. That is, a combination of the job of a general and a PM. Controlling the information may be necessary for survival, but it should not be the job description.